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<p>lol. I knew you’d say something like that, hawkette, because my setting the cutoff at the 20 lowest retention rates among the top 50 research universities swept in two of your favorites, Wake Forest and Emory. So let’s see, you think the appropriate cutoff is the 13 lowest out of 50—say a 3.9 or under is bad, but anything over that is OK? lol. Fine, but I’ll let others decide how to interpret that data. To my mind, anything in the 93 to 94 range is borderline—better than 90 or 92, but not as good as 96 or 97. </p>
<p>As for the small numbers phenomenon, you make a good point. But this is just amplified for LACs. At Scripps, for example—a school with a total enrollment of 899—a freshman retention rate of 90.2 means that just 22 students didn’t return for their sophomore year. Cut that number by by 6 to a total of 16 not returning and the retention rate shoots up to 93.9, enough to move Scripps from #3 lowest retention rate among LACs, to a rate that places it above the media for top 50 LACs. For that reason, I’d want to look at these data (and really any data involving LACs) over time; a one-year snapshot might give us a highly misleading picture based on the small numbers phenomenon. But if Scripps’ retention rate hovers around 90% over a period of years, I’d say they might have a problem: it means that 1 out of 10 students isn’t returning, and I’d want to know the reasons for it before sending my kid there.</p>